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II 



THE VIEWS 

OF 

JUDGE WOODWARD AND BISHOP HOPKINS 

OM 

NEGRO SLAVERY AT THE SOUTH, 



ILLUSTRATED FROM THE 



JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE ON A CEORCIAN 
PLANTATION 



MRS. FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE, 

(LATE BOTLER.) 




A True Picture. A Photoor* 



Badly-whippt d Slave. 



The next objection to the Slavery of the Southern States, is its presumed cruelty, 

because the refractory slave is punished with corporeal correction. But our 

Northern law allows the same in the case of children and apprentices." 

" The Saviour himself used a scourge of small cords when he drove 

the money-changers from the Temple. Are our modern 

philanthropists more merciful than Christ, and wiser 

than the Almighty?" — Bishop Hopkins. 

(See his Letter on Slavery, published by 

the Democratic Slate Central 

Committee.) 



SLAVERY THE CHIEF CORNER-STONE. 

•'This stone i Slavery)* which was rejected hy the first builders (of the 
Constitution), is become the chief stone of the corner in our new edifice." 

— Speech of Alexander H. Stephens, Viee- President of the Confederate States, delivered March 21, 1861. 



SOUTHERN SLAVERY AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

From several pamphlets recently published and extensively circulated, it has 
become evident that a new issue in Pennsylvania party politics has been inau- 
gurated, viz , Whether Negro Slavery, as it is maintained in the Southern States 
now in rebellion against the National Government, is consistent with the Chris- 
tian religion ? 

I deem it proper, therefore, in order that every one may be enabled to judge 
for hiraBelf on this important subject, to give a very brief summary of the legal 
incidents of Southern Slavery. Every part and parcel of this summary may be 
authenticated by the statutes of one or other of those Slates, and the reported 
decisions of their highest courts of judicature. 

It is a fundamental principle of Negro Slavery that a slave is a thing — a chat- 
tel wholly under the dominion of his master, subject to be bought and sold pre- 
cisely as if he were a horse or a mule. He may be fed and clothed much or 
little, as his master may prescribe ; may be compelled to labor as well on one 
day as another, and as hard and as long as his master may direct. 

The slave has no legal right whatever, — cannot own anything, may be forbid- 
den all society with his fellows, may be kept in the most abject ignorance, is not 
allowed to be instructed to read, is without any legal provision for acquiring a 
knowledge of his religious duties, incapable of a lawful marriage, denied all au- 
thority over those who are admitted to be his natural offspring, liable to have 
them at auy age torn from him, without the slightest consultation or deference 
to his judgment or his feelings, and liable himself to be torn from them and from 
their mother, with whom he has been permitted and encouraged to cohabit as ' 
his wife. He may be thus ruthlessly carried to a returnless distance, not only 
from his children and their mother, but from all else that he may hold dear. 

The law also expressly sanctions his master in beating him with a horsewhip 
or cowskin, in chaining him, putting him in irons, compelling him to wear 
pronged iron collars, confining him in prison, hunting him with dogs, and when 
outlawed, as he may be for running away, he may be killed by any one to whom 
he may refuse to surrender. 

The whole of this summary I pledge myself to maintain in its literal and full 
extent, according to the law of one or another of the Southern Slaveholding 

States. 

GEORGE M. STROUD. 

Philadelphia, Sept. 15, 1863. 



THE VIEWS 

OF 

JUDGE WOODWARD A.\D BISHOP QOPKIXS 

ON 

NEGRO SLAVERY AT THE SOUTH, 

ILLUSTRATED FROM THE 

JOURNAL OF A RES10ENGE ON A GEORGIAN 

PLANTATION 

BY 

MRS. FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE, 
(late butler.) 

■■■■■■':." •".■. 




V 



•' 






■"^i 1 ^^ 

Ip 



A True Picture. A Photographic View of a Badly-whipped 

The next objection to the Slavery of the Southern States, is its presumed cruelty, 

because the r.efractory slave is punished with corporeal correction. But our 

Northern law allows the same in the case of children ami apprentices." 

" The Saviour himself used a scourge of small cords when he drove 

the money-changers from the Temple. Are our modern 

philanthropists more merciful than Christ, and wiser 

than the Almighty ?" — Bishop Hopkins. 

{See his Letter on Slaver;/, published by 

the Democratic S/i'te Central 

Committee.) 






The Diary from which the following extracts are taken, was kept 
in the winter and spring of 1838-9, on an estate consisting of rice 
and cotton plantations, in the islands at the entrance of the Alta- 
maha, on the coast of Georgia. The narrative is in the form of 
letters written by Frances Anne Kemble (then Mrs. Butler) to a 
friend in the North. 

The slaves in whom she then had an unfortunate interest, were 
sold some years ago. The islands themselves are at present in the 
power of the Northern troops. The record contained in the pages 
of her Journal is a picture of conditions of human existence which 
it is hoped and believed have passed away. If these few pages 
leave any one in doubt as to the moral, social, and political effects 
of Southern Slavery, he is referred to the Journal itself, as recently 
published. No argument will reach the man who is not convinced 
by this "remarkable revelation of the interior life of Slavery." 

The following narrative is divided into five chapters, under con- 
venient titles, with head quotations from the extraordinary speech t- 
of Judge Woodward, and still more extraordinary letter of Bishop 
Hopkins, as published and distributed by the Democratic Stat* 
Central Committee. These startling views of the Judge and the 
Bishop are best met. by the record of Southern Slavery as it is, 
from the pen of a Christian woman, who had unusual means of 
observation, and every motive to soften her account of its bar- 
barities. 



NEGRO SLAVERY AT THE SOUTH 

ILLUSTRATED. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE MORAL LAW. 

" The third proof that Slavery was authorized by the Almighty 
occurs in the last of the Ten Commandments, delivered from Mount 
Sinai, and universally acknowledged by Jews and Christians as 
' The Moral Law,' l Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, 
thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his man-servant, nor 
his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy 
neighbor's.' (Exod. 20 : 17.) Here it is evident that the principle 
of property. — ' anything that is thy neighbor's,' — runs through the 
whole. I am quite aware, indeed, of the prejudice which many good 
people entertain against the idea of property in a human being, 
and shall consider it in due time amongst the objections. I am 
equally aware that the wives of our day may take umbrage at the 
law, w 7 hich places them in the same sentence with the slave, and 
even with the house and the cattle. But the truth is none the less 
certain." — Bishop Hopkins's Letter, page 2. 

"Human bondage and property in man is divinely sanctioned, 
if not ordained." — Judge Woodward's Speech of Dece^idi.r 
13th,' 1860, page 10, of Edition of Democratic State Central Com- 
mittee. 

(Extract from Mrs. Kemblb's Journal.) 

THE STORY OP PSYCHE, A SLAVE WOMAN. 

My dearest E : 

We have as a sort of under nursemaid and assistant of my dear M- 



whose white complexion, as I wrote you, occasioned such indignation to 
my Southern fellow-travellers, and such extreme perplexity to the poor 
slaves on our arrival here, a much more orthodox servant for these parts, 
a young woman named Psyche, but commonly called Sack, not a very 
graceful abbreviation of the divine heathen appellation. She cannot be 
much over twenty, has a very pretty figure, a graceful, gentle deportment, 
and a face which, but for its color (she is a dingy mulatto), would be 
pretty, and is extremely pleasing, from the perfect sweetness of its ex- 
pression. She is always serious, not to say sad and silent, and has always 



an air of melancholy and timidity, that ha's frequently struck me very 
much, and would have made me think some special anxiety or sorrow must 
occasion it, but that God knows the whole condition of these wretched 
people naturally produces such a deportment, and there is no necessity to 
seek for special or peculiar causes to account for it. Just in proportion as 
I have found the slaves on this plantation intelligent and advanced beyond 
the general brutish level of the majority, I have observed this pathetic ex- 
pression of countenance in them, a mixture of sadness and fear, the in- 
voluntary exhibition of the two feelings, which I suppose must be the 
predominant experience of their whole lives, regret and apprehension, not 
the less heavy, either of them, for being, in some degree, vague and inde- 
finite, — a sense of incalculable past loss and injury, and a dread of incalcu- 
lable future loss and injury. 

I have never questioned Psyche as to her sadness, because in the first 
place, as I tell you, it appears to me most natural, and is observable in all 
the slaves whose superior natural or acquired intelligence allows of their 
filling situations of trust or service about the house and family ; and 
though I cannot and will not refuse to hear any and every tale of suffering 
which these unfortunates bring to me, I am anxious to spare both myself 
and them the pain of vain appeals to me for redress and help, which, alas ! 
it is too often utterly out of my power to give them. It is useless, and 
indeed, worse than useless, that they should see my impotent indignation 
and unavailing pity, and hear expressions of compassion for them, and 
horror at their condition, which might only prove incentives to a hopeless 
resistance on their part to a system, under the hideous weight of whose 
oppression any individual or partial revolt must be annihilated and ground 
into the dust. Therefore, as I tell you, T asked yche no questions, but 

to my great astonishment, the other clay M asked me if I knew to 

whom Psyche belonged, as the poor woman had inquired of her with much 
hesitation and anguish., if she could tell her who owned her and her chil- 
dren. She h;:s two, nice little children under six years old, whom she keeps 
as clean and tidy, and who are sad and as silent as herself. My astonish- 
ment at this question was, as you will readily believe, not small, and I 
forthwith sought out Psyche for an explanation. She was thrown into 
extreme perturbation at finding that her question had been referred to me, 
and it was some time before I could sufficiently reassure her to be able to 
comprehend, in the midst of her reiterated entreaties for pardon, and hopes 
that she had not offended me, that she did not know herself who owned 
her. She was, at one time, the property of Mr. K , the former over- 
seer, of whom I have already spoken to you, and who has just been paying 

Mr. a visit. He, like several of his predecessors in the management, 

has contrived to make a fortune upon it (though it yearly decreases in 
value to the owners, but this is the inevitable course of things in the South- 



crn States), and has purchased a plantation of his own in Alabama, I be- 
lieve, or one of the Southwestern States. Whether she still belonged to 

Mr. K or not she did not know, and entreated me, if she did, to 

endeavor to persuade Mr. to buy her. Now you must know that 

this poor woman is the wife of one of Mr. B 's slaves, a fine, intelli- 
gent, active, excellent young man, whose whole family are among some of 
the very best specimens of character and capacity on the estate. I was so 
astonished at the (to me) extraordinary state of things revealed by poor 
Sack's petition, that I could only tell her that I had supposed all the 
negroes on the plantation were Mr. 's property, but that I would cer- 
tainly inquire, and find out for her, if I could, to whom she belonged, and 

if I could, endeavor to get Mr. to purchase her, if she really was 

not his. 

Now E , just conceive for one moment the state of mind of this 

woman, believing herself to belong to a man who in a few days was going 
down to One of those abhorred and dreaded Southwestern States, and who 
would then compel her, with her poor little children, to leave her husband 
and the only home she had ever known, and all the ties of affection, rela- 
tionship, and association of her former life, to follow him thither, in all 
human probability never again to behold any living creature that she had 
seen before; and this was so completely a matter of course that it was not 
even thought necessary to apprise her positively of the fact, and the only 
thing that interposed between her and this most miserable fate was the 

faint hope that Mr. might have purchased her and her children. 

But if he had, if this great deliverance had been vouchsafed to her, the 
knowledge of it was not thought necessary; and with this deadly dread at 
her heart, she was living day after day, waiting upon me and seeing me, 
with my husband beside me, and my children in my arms in blessed secu- 
rity, safe from all separation but the one reserved in God's great providence 
for all his creatures. Do you think I wondered any more at the woc-begone 
expression of her countenance, or do you think it was easy for me to 
restrain within prudent and proper limits the expression of my feelings at 
such a state of things? And she had gone on from day to day enduring 

this agony, till I suppose its own intolerable pressure and M 's sweet 

countenance and gentle sympathizing voice and manner had constrained 
her to lay down this great burden of sorrow at our feet. I did not see 

Mr. until the evening; but in the meantime meeting Mr. , 

the overseer, with whom, as I believe I have already told you, we are 
living here, I asked him about Psyche, and who was her proprietor, when, 
to my infinite surprise, he told me that he had bought her and her children 

from Mr. K , who had offered them to him. saying that they would 

be rather troublesome to him than otherwise down where he was going; 
"and so," said Mr. , "as I had no objection to investing a little 



money that way, I bought them." With a heart much lightened, I flew 
to tell poor Psyche the news, so that, at any rate, she might be relieved 
from the dread of any immediate separation from her husband. You can - 
imagine better than I can tell you what her sensations were; but she still 

renewed her prayer that I would, if possible, induce Mr. to purchase 

her, and I promised to do so. 

Early the next morning, while I was still dressing, I was suddenly 

startled by hearing voices in loud tones in Mr. 's dressing-room, which 

i in5 tny bedroom, and the noise increasing until there was an absolute 
cry of despair uttered by some man. I could restrain myself no longer, 
but opened the door of communication and saw Joe, the young man, poor 
Psyche's husband, raving almost in a state of frenzy, and in a voice broken 
with sobs and almost inarticulate with passion, reiterating his determination 
never to leave this plantation, never to go to Alabama, never to leave his 
old father and mother, his poor wife and children, and dashing his hat, 
which he was wringing like a cloth in his hands, upon the ground, he 

declared he would kill himself if he was compelled to follow Mr. K . 

I glanced from the poor wretch to Mr. , who. was standing, leaning 

against a table with his arms folded, occasionally uttering a few words of 
counsel to his slave to be quiet and not fret, and not make a fuss about 
what there was no help for. I retreated immediately from the horrid 
scene, breathless with surprise and dismay, and stood for some time in my 
own room, with my heart and temples throbbing to such a degree that I 
could hardly support myself. As soon as I recovered myself I again 

sought Mr. , and inquired of him if he knew the cause of poor 

Joe's distress. He then told me that Mr. , who is highly pleased 

with Mr. K 's past administration of his property, wished, on his 

departure for his newly-acquired slave plantation, to give him some token 
of his satisfaction, and had made him a pt'ebent of the man Joe, who had 
just received the intelligence that he was to go down to Alabama with his 
new owner the next day, leaving father, mother, wife, and children behind. 
You will not wonder that the man required a little judicious soothing 
under such circumstances, and you will also, I hope, admire the humanity 
of the sale of his wife and children by the owner who was going to take 
him to Alabama, because they would be incumbrances rather than other- 
wise down there. If Mr. K did not do this after he knew that the 

man was his, then Mr. gave him to be carried down to the South 

after his wife and children were sold to remain in Georgia. I do not 
know which was the real transaction, for I have not had the heart to ask; 
but you will easily imagine which of the two cases I prefer believing. 

When I saw Mr. after this most wretched story became known to 

me in all its details, I appealed to him, for his own soul's sake, not to 
commit so great a cruelty. Poor Joe's agony while remonstrating with 



his master was hardly greater than mine while arguing with him upon this 
bitter piece of inhumanity — how I cried, and how 1 adjured, and how all 
my sense of justice, and of mercy, and of pity for the poor wretch, and of 
wretchedness at finding myself implicated in such a state of things, broke 
in torrents of words from my lips and tears from my eyes ! God knows 
such a sorrow at seeing any one I belonged to commit such an act was 
indeed a new and terrible experience to me, and it seemed to me that I 

was imploring Mr. to save himself more than to spare these wretches. 

He gave me no answer whatever, and I have since thought that the 
intemperate vehemence of my entreaties and expostulations perhaps de- 
served that he should leave me as he did without one single word of re- 
ply ; and miserable enough I remained. Toward evening, as I was sitting 

alone, my children having gone to bed, Mr. came into the room. 

I had but one subject in my mind; I had not been able to eat for it. I 
could hardly sit still for the nervous distress which every thought of these 
poor people filled me with. As he sat down looking over some accounts, I 

said to him, "Have you seen Joe this afternoon, Mr. ?" (I give 

you our conversation as it took place.) " Yes, ma'am ; he is a great deal 
happier than he was this morning." "Why, how is that?" asked I, 

eagerly. " Oh, he is not going to Alabama. Mr. K heard that he 

had kicked up a fuss about it (being in despair at being torn from one's 
wife and children is called kicking up a fuss; this is a sample of overseer 
appreciation of human feelings), and said that if the fellow wasn't willing 
to go with him, he did not wish to be bothered with any niggers down 
there who were to be troublesome, so he might stay behind." " And does 
Psyche know this ?" " Yes, ma'am, I suppose so." I drew a long- 
breath ; and whereas my needle had stumbled through the stuff" I was 
sewing fur an hour before, as if my fingers could not guide it, the 
regularity and rapidity of its evolutions were now quite edifying. The 
man was for the present safe, and I remained silently pondering his de- 
liverance and the whole proceeding, and the conduct of every one engaged 

in it, and, above all, Mr. 's share in the transaction, and I think, for 

the first time, almost a sense of horrible personal responsibility and impli- 
cation took hold of my mind, and I felt the weight of an unimagined 
guilt upon my conscience; and yet, God knows, this feeling of self- 
condemnation is very gratuitous on my part, since when I married 

Mr. I knew nothing of these dreadful possessions of his, and even 

if I had I should have been much puzzled to have formed any idea of the 
.itate of things in which I now find myself plunged, together with those 
whose well-doing is as vital to me almost as my own. 

With these agreeable reflections I went to bed. Mr. said no! a 

word to me upon the subject of these poor people all the next day, and in 
the mean time I became very impatient of this reserve on his part, because 



I was dying to prefer my request that he would purchase Psyche and her 
children, and so prevent any future separation between her and her Bus- 
band, as I supposed he would not again attempt to make a present of Joe, 
at least to any one who did not wish to be bothered with his wife and 

children. In the evening I was again with Mr. alone in the 

strange, bare, wooden-walled sort of shanty which is our sitting-room, and 
revolving in 1113' mind the means of rescuing Psyche from her miserable 
Suspense, a long chain of all my possessions, in the shape of bracelets, 
necklaces, brooches, earrings, etc., wound in glittering procession through 
my brain, with many hypothetical calculations of the value of each 
separate ornament, and the very doubtful probability of the amount of the 
whole being equal to the price of this poor creature and her children; and 
then the great power and privilege I had foregone of earning money by my 
own labor occurred to me, and I think, for the first time in my life, my 
past profession assumed an aspect that arrested my thoughts most seriously. 
For the last four years of my life that preceded my marriage I literally 
coined money, and never until this moment, I think, did I reflect on the 
great means of good, to myself and others, that I so gladly agreed to give 
up forever for a maintenance by the unpaid labor of slaves — people toiling 
not only unpaid, but under the bitter conditions the bare contemplation of 
which was then wringing my heart. You will not wonder that when, in 

the midst of such cogitatipns, I suddenly accosted Mr. , it was to 

this effect: "Mr. , I have a particular favor to beg of you. 

Promise me that you will never sell Psyche and her children without first 
letting me know of your intention to do so, and giving me the option of 

buying them." Mr. is a remarkably deliberate man, and squints, 

so that, when he has taken a little time in directing his eyes to you, you 
are still unpleasantly unaware of any result in which you are concerned. 
He laid down a bonk he was reading, and directed his head and one of his 
eyes toward me and answered, "Dear me, ma'am, I am very sorry — I have 
sold them." My work fell down on the ground, and my mouth opened 
wide, but I could utter no sound, I was so dismayed and surprised ; and 
he deliberately proceeded : " I didn't know, ma'am, you see, at all, that 
you entertained any idea of making an investment of that nature ; for I'm 
sure, if I had, I would willingly have sold the woman to you ; but I sold 

her and her children this morning to Mr. ." My dear E , though 

had resented my unmeasured upbraidings', you see they had not been 

without some good effect, and though he had, perhaps justly, punished my 
violent outbreak of indignation about the miserable scene I had witnessed 
by not telling me of his humane purpose, he had bought these poor 
creatures, and so, I trust, secured them from any such misery in future. I 

jumped up and left Mr. still speaking, and ran to find Mr. , 

to thank him for what he had done, and with that will now bid you good- 



by. Think, E , liow it feres with slaves on plantations where there is 

no crazy Englishwoman to weep, and entreat, and implore, and upbraid for 
them, and no master willing to listen to such appeals. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE GOLDEN RULE. 

"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should 
do to you, do ye even so to them ; for this is the law and the 
prophets." — Matthew 7 : 12. 

" We consign them (the slaves) to no heathen thrall, but to 
Christian men, professing the same faith with us, speaking the same 
language, reading the golden rale, in no one-sided and disto?°ted 
sliape, but as it is recorded — a rule to slaves, as well as to 
masters." — Judge Woodward's Speech of December 13th, 
1860, page 10, Democratic Edition. 

"It is said by some, however, that the great principle of the 
Gospel, love to God and love to man, necessarily involved the con- 
demnation of Slavery. Yet how should it have any such result 
when we remember that this was no new principle, but, on the 
contrary, was laid down by the Deity to his own chosen people, 
and was quoted from the Old Testament by the Savior himself? 
and why sTiould Slavery be thought inconsistent with it ? In the 
relation of master and slave, we are assured by our Southern 
brethren that there is incomparably more mutual love than ever 
can be found between the employer and the hireling." — Bishop 
Hopkins's Letter, page 4, Democratic Edition. 

Slavery never appeared so hateful, nor slaveholders so vulgar 
and brutal, as in the following extracts, where a woman tells the 
world what the black women of the South have so long endured. 

(Extracts from Mhs. Kemble's Journal.) 

My Dear E : 

Before closing this letter, I have a mind to transcribe to you the 
entries for to-day recorded in a sort of day-book, where I put down very 
mccinetly the number of people who visit me, their petitions and ail- 
ments, and also such special particulars concerning them as seem to me 
w<->rth recording. You will see how miserable the physical condition of 



10 

many of these poor creatures is; and their physical condition, it is insisted 
by those who uphold this evil system, is the only part of it which is pros- 
perous, happy, and compares well with that of Northern laborers. Judge 
from the details I now send you ; and never forget, while reading them, 
that the people on this plantation are well off, and consider themselves 
well off, in comparison with the slaves on some of the neighboring estates. 

Fanny has had six children ; all dead but one. Sbe caxuc to beg to 
have her work in the field lightened. 

Nanny has had three children; two of them are dead. She came to 
implore that the rule of sending them into the field three weeks after their 
confinement might be altered. 

Leah, Csesar's wife has had six children; three are dead. 

Sophy, Lewis's wife, came to beg for some old linen. She is suffering 
fearfully; has had ten children ; five of them are dead. The principal 
favor she asked was a piece of meat, which I gave her. 

Sally, Scipio's wife has had two miscarriages and three children born, on* 
of whom is dead. She came complaining of incessant pain and weakness 
in her back. This woman was a mulatto daughter of a slave called Sophy, 
by a white man of the name of Walker, who visited the plantation. 

Charlotte, Renty's wife, had had two miscarriages, and was with child 
again. She was almost crippled with rheumatism, and showed me a pair 
of poor swollen knees that made my heart ache. I have promised her a 
pair of flannel trowsers, which I must forthwith set about making. 

Sarah, Stephen's wife — this woman's case and history were alike deplo- 
rable. She had had four miscarriages, had brought seven children into 
the world, five of whom were dead, and was again with child v She com- 
plained of dreadful pains in the back, and an internal tumor which swells 
with the exertion of working in the fields ; probably, I think, she is rup- 
tured. She told me she had once been mad and had ran into the woods, 
where she contrived to elude discovery for some time, but was at last 
tracked and brought back, when she was tied up by the arms, and heavy 
logs fastened to her feet, and was severely flogged. After this she 
contrived to escape again, and lived for some time skulking in the 
woods, and she supposes mad, for when she was taken again she was en- 
tirely naked. She subsequently recovered from this derangement, and 
seems now just like all the other poor creatures who come to me for help 
and pity. I suppose her constant childbearingand hard labor in the fields 
at the same time may have produced the temporary insanity. 

Sukey, Bush's wife, only came to pay her respects. She had had four 
miscarriages ; had brought eleven children into the world, five of whom 
are dead. 

Molly, Quambo's wife, also only came to see me. Hers was the best 
account I have yet received ; she had had uine children, and six of them 
were still alive. 



11 

This is only the entry for to-day, in my diary, of the people's complaints 
and visits. Can you conceive a more wretched picture than that which 
it exhibits of the conditions under which these women live ? Their case. 1 -- 
are in no respect singular, and though they come with pitiful entreaties 
that I will help them with some alleviation of their pressing physical dis- 
tresses it seems to me marvellous with what desperate patience (I write it ad- 
visedly), patience of utter despair, they endure their sorrow-laden existence. 
Even the poor wretch who told that miserable story of insanity, and 
lonely hidings in the swamp, and scourging when she was found, and of 
her renewed madness and flight, did so in a sort of low plaintive monotonous 
murmur of misery, as if sueh sufferings were " all in the day's work." 

I ask these questions about their children, because I think the number 
they bear as compared with the number they rear a fair gauge of the effect 
of the system on their own health and that of their offspring. There was 
hardly one of these women, as you will see by the details I have noted of 
their ailments, who might not have been a candidate for a bed in a hospi- 
tal, and they had come to me after working all day in the fields. 



Dear E : 

This morning I paid my second visit to the Infirmary, and found there 
had been some faint attempt at sweeping and cleaning, in compliance with 
my entreaties. TChe poor woman Harriet, however, whose statement with 
regard to the impossibility of their attending properly to their children had 
been so vehemently denied by the overseer, was crying bitterly. I asked 
her what ailed her, when, more by signs and dumbshow than words, she 

and old Rose informed me that Mr. had flogged her that morning 

for having told me that the women had not time to keep their children 
clean. It is part of the regular duty of every overseer to visit the In- 
firmary at least once a day, which he generally does in the morning, and 

Mr. 's visit had preceded mine but a short time only, or I might 

have been edified by seeing a man horsewhip a woman. I again and again 
made her repeat her story, and she again and again affirmed that she had 
been flogged for what she told me, none of the whole company in the room 
denying it or contradicting her. I left the room, because I was so dis- 
gusted and indignant that I could hardly restrain my feelings, and to ex- 
press them could have produced no single good result. 

Mr. was called out this evening to listen to a complaint of over- 
work from a gang of pregnant women. I did not stay to listen to the de- 
tails of their petition, for I am unable to command myself on such occa- 
sions, and Mr. seemed positively degraded in my eyes as he stood 

enforcing upon these women the necessity of their fulfilling their appointed 
tasks. How honorable he would have appeared to me begrimed with the 



12 

sweat and toil of the coarsest manual labor, to what he then seemed, setting 
forth to these wretched, ignorant women, as a duty, their unpaid exacted 
labor ! I turned away in bitter disgust. I hope this sojourn among 

Mr. 's slaves may not lessen my respect for him, but I fear it; for 

the details of slaveholding are so unmanly, letting alone every other con- 
sideration, that I know not how any one with the spirit of a man can con- 
descend to them. 

This morning I had a visit from two of the women, Charlotte and Judy, 
who came to me for help and advice for a complaint, which it really seems 
to me every other woman on the estate is cursed with, and which is a 
direct result of the conditions of their existence. The practice of sending 
women to labor in the fields in the third week after their confinement is a 
specific for causing this infirmity, and I know no specific for curing it 
under these circumstances. As soon as these, poor things had departed 
with such comfort as I could give them, and the bandages they especially 
begged for, three other sable graces introduced themselves, Edie, Louisa, 
and Diana; the former told me she had had a family of seven children, 
but had lost them all through "ill luck," as she denominated the ignorance 
and ill treatment which were answerable for the loss of these, as of so many 
other poor little creatures, their fellows. Having dismissed her and Diana 
with the sugar and rice they came to beg, I detained Louisa, whom I had 
never seen but in the presence of her old grandmother, whose version of 
the poor child's escape to, and hiding in the woods, I ha* a desire to com- 
pare with the heroine's own story. She told it very simply, and it was 
most pathetic. She had not finished her task one day, when she said she 
felt ill, and unable to do so, and had been severely flogged by Driver Bran, 
in whose "gang" she then was. The next clay, in spite of this encourage- 
ment to labor, she had again been unable to complete her appointed work; 
and Bran having told her that he'd tie her up and flog her if she did not 
get it done, she had left the field and run into the swamp. " Tie you up, 
Louisa!" said I; "what is that?" She then described to me that they 
wei^ fastened up by their wrists to a beam or a branch of a tree, their feet 
barely touching the ground, so as to allow them no purchase for resistance 
or evasion of the lash, their clothes turned over their heads, and their 
backs scored with a leather thong, either by the driver himself, or, if he 
pleases to inflict their punishment by deputy, any of the men he may 
choose to summon to the office; it might be father, brother, husband, or 
lover, if the overseer so ordered it. I turned sick, and my blood curdled 
listening to these details from the slender young slip of a lassie, with her 
poor piteous face and murmuring, pleading voice. " Oh," said I, " Louisa; 
but the rattlesnakes — the dreadful rattlesnakes in the swamps; were you 
not afraid of those horrible creatures?" " Oh, missis," said the poor child, 
"me no tink of dem; me forget all 'bout dem for de fretting." "Why 



13 

did you come home at last?" "Oh, missis, me starve with hunger, me 
most dead with hunger before me come back." "And were you flogged, 
Louisa?" said I, with a shudder at what the answer might be. "No, 
missis, me go to hospital ; me almost dead and sick so long, 'spec Driver 
Bran him forgot 'bout de flogging." I am getting perfectly savage over 

all these doings, E , and really think I should consider my own throat 

and those of my children well cut if some night the people were to take it 
into their heads to clear off scores in that fashion. 



Returning from the hospital, I was accosted by poor old Teresa, the 
wretched n egress who had complained to me so grievously of her back 
being broken by hard work and childbearing. She was in a dreadful state 
of excitement, which she partly presently communicated to me, because 

she said Mr. had ordered her to be flogged for having complained 

to me as she did. It seems to me that I have come down here to be tor- 
tured, for this punishing these wretched creatures for crying out to me for 
help is really converting me into a source of increased misery to them. It 
is almost more than I can endure to hear these horrid stories of lashings 

inflicted because I have been invoked ; and though I dare say Mr. , 

thanks to my passionate appeals to him, gives me little credit for prudence 
or self-command, I have some, and I exercise it, too, when I listen to such 
tales as these with my teeth set fast and my lips closed. Whatever I 
may do to the master, I hold my tongue to the slaves, and I wonder how 
I do it. 

On my return to our own island, I visited another of the hospitals, and 
ihe settlements to which it belonged. The condition of these. places and 
of their inhabitants is, of course, the same all over the plantation, and if I 
were to describe them I should but weary you with a repetition of identical 
phenomena; filthy, wretched, almost naked, always b; I and bare- 

footed children ; negligent, ignorant, wretched mothers, whose apparent 
erence to the plight of their offspring, and utter incapacity to alter it, 
are the inevitable result of their slavery. It is hopeless to attempt to re- 
form their habits or improve their condition while the women arc con- 
demned to field labor; nor is it possible to over-estimate the bad moral 
effect of the system as regards the women entailing this enforced separation 
from their children, and neglect of all the cares and duties of mother, 
nurse, and even housewife, which are all merged in the me il toil 

of a human hoeing machine. It seems to me too — but upon this point I 
can not, of course, judge as well as the persons accustomed to and 
acquainted with the physical capacities of their slaves — that the labor is 
not judiciously distributed in many cases — at least not as far as the women 
are concerned. It is true that every able-bodied woman is made the most. 
of, in being driven afield as long as, under all and any circumstances, she 



14 

is able to wield a hoe ; but, on the other hand, stout, hale, hearty girls 
and boys, of from eight to twelve, and older, are allowed to lounge about, 
filthy and idle, with no pretence of an occupation but what they call 
"tend baby," i. e., see to the life and limbs of the little sslave infants, to 
whose mothers, working in distant fields, they carry them during the day 
to be suckled, and for the rest of the time leave them to crawl and kick 
in the filthy cabins or on the broiling sand which surrounds them, in 
which industry, excellent enough for the poor babies, these big lazy youths 
and. lasses emulate them. Again, I find many women who have borne 
from five to ten children, rated as workers, precisely as young women in 
the prime of their strength who have had none; this seems a cruel care- 
lessness. To be sure, while the women are pregnant their task is dimin- 
ished, and this, is one of the many indirect inducements held out to 
reckless propagation, which has a sort of premium offered to it in the con- 
sideration of less work and more food, counterbalanced by none of the 
sacred responsibilities which hallow and ennoble the relation of parent and 
child ; in short, as their lives are for the most part those of mere animals, 
their increase is literally mere animal breeding, to which every encourage- 
ment is given, for it adds to the master's live-stock and the value of his 
estate. 

CHAPTER III. 

AN INCALCULABLE BLESSING. 

" Here we see that the separation of husband and wife is posi- 
tively directed by the divine command, in order to secure the pro- 
perty of the master in his bond-maid and her offspring. 

"With this law before his eyes, what Christian can relieve that 
the Almighty attached immorality or sin to the condition of 
slavery?" — Bishop Hopkins's Letter, page 3, Democratic Com- 
mittee's Edition. 

"Negro slavery has been an incalculable blessing to us." — 
Judge Woodward's Speech, page 9, Democratic Committee* 
Edition. 

Judge of this "incalculable blessing"'' as it appears in the follow- 
ing plain every- day record of facts, as they exhibit the woes, horrors, 
and crimes of Slavery ! 

(Extract from Mrs. Kemble's Journal.) 

In a conversation with old " House Molly," as she is called, to distin- 
guish her from all other Mollies on the estate, she having had the honor 
of being a servant in Major 's house for many years, I asked her if 



15 

the relation between men and women who are what they call married, 
i. e.. who have agreed to live together as man and wife (the only species 
of marriage formerly allowed on the estate, I believe now London may 
read the Marriage Service to them), was considered binding by the people 
themselves and by the overseer. She said ''not much formerly," and 
that the people couldn't be expected to have much regard to such an en- 
gagement, utterly ignored as it was by Mr. K- , whose invariable rule, 

if he heard of any disagreement between a man and woman calling them- 
selves married, was immediately to bestow them in " marriage" on other 
parties, whether they chose it or not, by which summary process the 
slightest "incompatibility of temper" received the relief of a divorce more 
rapid and easy than even Germany could afford, and the estate lost nothing 
by any prolongation of celibacy on either side. Of course, the misery 
consequent upon such arbitrary destruction of voluntary and imposition of 
involuutary ties was nothing to Mr. K . 

I was very sorry to hear to-day that Mr. , the overseer at the 

rice-island, of whom I have made mention to you more than once in my 
letters, had had one of the men flogged very severely for getting his wife 
baptized. I was quite unable, from the account I received, to understand 
what his objection had been to the poor man's desire to make his wife at 
least a formal Christian ; but it does seem dreadful that such an act should 
be so visited. I almost wish I was back again at the rice-island ; for, 
though this is every way the pleasanter residence, I hear so much more 
that is intolerable of the treatment of the slaves from those I find here, 
that my life is really made wretched by it. There is not a single natural 
right that is not taken away from these unfortunate people, and the worst 
of all is, that their condition does not appear to me, upon farther observa- 
tion of it, to be susceptible of even partial alleviation as long as the funda- 
mental evil, the slavery itself, remains. 

The women who visited me yesterday evening were all in the family 
way, and came to entreat of mc to have the sentence (what else can I call 
it?) modified, which condemns them to resume their labor of hoeing in 
the fields three weeks after their confinement. They knew, of course, 
that I cannot interfere with their appointed labor, and therefore their sole 

entreaty was that I would use my influence with Mr. to obtain for 

them a month's respite from labor in' the field after childbcaring. Their 
principal spokeswoman, a woman with a bright sweet face, called Mary, 
and a very sweet voice, which is by no means an uncommon excellence 
among them, appealed to my own experience; and while she spoke of my 
babies, and my carefully tended, delicately nursed, and tenderly watched 
confinement and convalescence, and implored mc to have a kind of labor 



16 

given to them less exhausting during the month after their confinement, I 
held the table before me so hard in order not to cry, that I think my 
fino-ers ought to have left a mark on it. At leugth I told them that Mr. 

had forbidden me to bring him any more complaints from them, for that 

he thought the ease with which I received and believed their stones only 
tended to make them discontented, and that, therefore, I feared I could 
not promise to take their petitions to him ; but that he would be coming- 
down to " the Point" soon, and that they had better come then some time 
when I was with him, and say what they had just been saying to me ; and 
with this and various small bounties, I was forced, with a heavy heart, to 
dismiss them ; and when they were gone, with many exclamations of " Oh 
yes, missis, you will, you will speak to massa for we ; God bless you, 
missis, we sure you will !" I had my cry out for them, for myself, for us. 
All these women had had large families, and all of them had lost half 
their children, and several of them had lost more. How I do ponder upon 
the strange fate which has brought me here, from so far away, from sur- 
roundings so curiously different. How my own people in that blessed 
England of my birth would marvel if they could suddenly have a vision of 
me as I sit here, and how sorry some of them would be for me ! 

After I had been in the house a little while, I was summoned out again 
to receive the petition of certain poor women in the family- way to have 
their work lightened. I was, of course, obliged to tell them that I could 
not interfere in the matter; that their master was away, and that when he 
came back, they must present their request to him : they said they had 
already begged " massa," and he had refused, and they thought, perhaps, 
if " missis" be^ed " massa" for them, he would lighten their task. Poor 
"missis," poor " massa," poor woman, that I am to have such prayers ad- 
dressed to me ! I had to tell them that if they had already spoken to their 
master, I was afraid my doing so would be of no use, but that when he 
came back I would try; so choking with crying, I turned away from them, 
and re-entered the house, to the chorus of " Oh ! thank you, missis ! God 

bless you, missis !' ? E , I think an improvement might be made upon 

that caricature published a short time ago, called the " Chivalry of the 
South." 1 think an elegant young Carolinian or Georgian gentleman, 
whip in hand, driving a gang of " lusty women," as they are called here, 
would be a pretty version of the " Chivalry of the South,"— a little coarse, 
I am afraid you will say. Oh ! quite horribly coarse, but then so true, — 
a great matter in works of art, which nowadays appear to be thought ex- 
cellent only in proportion to their lack of ideal elevation. That would be 
a subject, and a treatment of it, which could not be accused of imaginative 
exaggeration at any rate. 

After my return home, I had my usual evening reception, and among 



17 

other pleasant incidents of plantation life, heard the following agreeable 
anecdote from a woman named Sophy, who came to beg for some rice. 
In asking her about her husband and children, she said she had never had 
any husband; that she had had two children by a white man of the name 
of Walker, who was employed at the mill on the rice-island. She was in 
the hospital after the birth of the second child she bore this man, and at 

the same time two women, Judy and Sylla, of whose children Mr. K 

was the father, were recovering from their confinements. It was not a 

month since any of them had been delivered, when Mrs. K came to 

the hospital, had them all three severely flogged, a process which she per- 
sonally superintended, and then sent them to Five Pound, — the swamp 
Botany Bay of the plantation, of which I have told you, — with farther 

orders to the drivers to flog them every day for a week. Now, E , if 

I make you sick with these disgusting stories, I cannot help it; they are 
the life itself here. Hitherto I have thought these details intolerable 
enough, but this apparition of a female fiend in the middle of this hell I 
confess adds an element of cruelty which seems to me to surpass all the 
rest. Jealousy is not an uncommon quality in the feminine temperament, 
and just conceive the fate of these unfortunate women between the passions 
of their masters and mistresses, each alike armed with power to oppress and 
torture them. Sophy went on to say that Isaac was her son by Driver 
Morris, who had forced her while she was in her miserable exile at Five 
Pound. Almost beyond my patience with this string of detestable details, 
I exclaimed, — foolishly enough, heaven knows, — " Ah ! but don't you 
know, — did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that it is a sin to live 

with men who are not your husbands ?" Alas ! E , what could the 

poor creature answer but what she did, seizing me at the same time vehe- 
mently by the wrist : "Oh yes, missis, we know ; we know all about that 
well enough ; but we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from de 
whip. When he made me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him 
no? he have strength to make me." I have written down the woman's 
words ; I wish I could write down the voice and look of abject misery with 
which they were spoken. Now you will observe that the story was not 
told to me as a complaint; it was a thing long past and over, of which she 
only spoke in the natural course of accounting for her children to me. 
I make no comment; what need, or can I add to such stories? But how 
is such a state of things to endure ? and again, how is it to end ? While 
I was pondering, as it seemed to me, at the very bottom of the Slough of 
Despond, on this miserable creature's story, another woman came in (Tenia), 
carrying in her arms a child the image of the mulatto Bran ; she came to 
beg for flannel. I asked her who was her husband. She said she was not 
married. Her child is the child of Bricklayer Temple, who has a wife at 
the rice-island. By this time, what do you think of the moralities, as well 

2 



18 

as the amenities of slave life ? These are the conditions which can only 
be known to one who lives among them ; flagrant acts of cruelty may be 
rare, but this ineffable state of utter degradation, this really beastly exis- 
tence, is the normal condition of these men and women, and of that no one 
seems to take heed, nor have I ever heard it described, so as to form any 
adequate conception of it, till I found myself plunged into it. Where 
and how is one to begin the cleansing of this horrid pestilential imnion- 
dezzio of an existence ? 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE NEW DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 

"For liberty, equality, and fraternity, we have deliberately 
substituted slavery, subordination, and government." — Richmond 
Examiner, May 30, 1863. 

" First on the list stand the propositions of the far-famed Decla- 
ration of Independence, ' that all men are created equal ; that they 
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that 
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' These 
statements are here called 'self-evident truths;' but with due re- 
spect to the celebrated names which are appended to this document, 
I have never been able to comprehend that they are ' truths ' at 
all." — Bishop Hopkins's Letter, page 7. 

" I have been, I fear, unreasonably tedious in thus endeavoring 
to show why I utterly discard these famous propositions of the 
Declaration of Independence. It is because I am aware of the 
strong hold which they have gained over the ordinary mind of the 
nation. They are assumed by thousands upon thousands, as if they 
were the very doctrines of Divine truth, and they are made the 
basis of the hostile feeling against the Slavery of the South, not- 
withstanding their total want of rationality" — Bishop Hopkins's 
Letter, page 9. 

" I am utterly opposed to those popular propositions (of the Dec- 
laration of Independence), not only because I hold them to be alto- 
gether fallacious and untrue, for the reason already given, but 
further, because their tendency is in direct contrariety to the pre- 
cepts of the Gospel, and the highest interests of the individual man ; 



19 

for -what is the unavoidable effect of this doctrine of human equality ? 
Is it not to nourish the spirit of pride, envy, and contention ? To 
set the servant against the master, the poor against the rich, the 
weak against the strong, the ignorant against the educated ? To 
loosen all the bonds and relations of society, and reduce the whole 
duty of subordination to the selfish cupidity of pecuniary interest, 
without an atom of respect for age, for office, for law, for govern- 
ment, for Providence, or for the word of God ?" — Bishop Hopkins's 
Letter, 'page 10. 

" The fifth objection which often meets the Northern ear, pro- 
ceeds from the overweening value attached in our age and country 
to the name of liberty, since it is common to call it the dearest 
right of man, and to esteem its loss as the greatest possible calamity; 
hence, we frequently find persons who imagine that the whole ar- 
gument is triumphantly settled by the question, ' How would you 
like to be a slave?' This is a ' very puerile interrogatory."" — 
Bishop Hopkins's Letter, page 13. 

The above quotations are from a document issued by the State 
Central Committee of the Democratic Party ! If Slavery, and not 
Freedom, is to be the corner-stone of our Republican Government, 
let the following account of the poor whites of the South, show 
what such doctrines lead to ! 

(Extract from Journal of Mrs. Kemble.) 
On our drive we passed occasionally a tattered man or woman, whose 
yellow mud complexion, straight features and singularly sinister counte- 
nance bespoke an entirely different race from the negro population in the 
midst of which they lived. These are the so-called Pine-landers of Geor- 
gia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an 
Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth — filthy,' 
lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler 
attributes which have been occasionally found allied to the vices of savage 
nature. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception abjectly 
poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them 
to an equality with the abhorred negroes; they squat, and steal, and 
starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilized societies, and their 
countenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition, and the utter 
degradation of their natures. To the crime of Slavery, though they 
have no profitable part or lot in it, they arc fiercely accessory, because it 
is the barrier which divides the black and white races, at the foot of which 
they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of 



20 

the base freedom that still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of 
the soil.* 

After dinner I had a most interesting conversation with Mr. K . 



Among other subjects he gave me a lively and curious description of the 
yeomanry of Georgia, more properly termed Pine-landers. Have you visions 
now of well-to-do farmers with comfortable homesteads, decent habits, 
industrious, intelligent, cheerful and thrifty ? Such, however, is not the 
yeomanry of Georgia. Labor being here the especial portion of slaves, it 
is thenceforth degraded, and considered unworthy of all but slaves. No 
white man, therefore, of any class puts hand to work of any kind soever. 
This is an exceedingly dignified way of proving their gentility for the 
lazy planters who prefer an idle life of semi-starvation and barbarism to the 
degradation of doing anything themselves; but the effect on the poorer 
whites of the country is terrible. I speak now of the scattered white 
population, who, too poor to possess land or slaves, and having no means 
of living in the towns, squat (most appropriately is it so termed) either 
on other men's land or government districts — always here swamp or pine 
barren — and claim masterdom over the place they invade, till ejected by 
the rightful proprietors. These wretched creatures will not, for they are 
whites (and labor belongs to blacks and slaves alone here), labor for their 
own subsistence. They are hardly protected from the weather by the rude 
shelters they frame for themselves in the midst of these dreary woods. 
Their food is chiefly supplied by shooting the wild-fowl and venison, and 
stealing from the cultivated patches of the plantations nearest at hand. 
Their clothes hang about them in filthy tatters, and the combined squalor 
and fierceness of their appearance is really frightful. 

This population is the direct growth of slavery. The planters are loud 

*Of such is the white family so wonderfully described in Mrs. Stowe's " Dred,'' 
whose only slave brings up the orphaned children of his masters with such ex- 
quisitely grotesque and pathetic tenderness. From such the conscription which 
has fed the Southern army in the deplorable civil conflict now raging in America 
has drawn its rank and file. Better " food for powder" the world could scarcely 
supply. Fierce and idle, with hardly one of the necessities or amenities that belong 
to civilized existence, they are hardy endurers of hardship, and reckless to a 
savage degree of the value of life, whether their own or others. The soldiers' 
pay, received or promised, exceeds in amount per month anything they ever 
earned before per year, and the war they wage is one that enlists all their proud 
and ferocious instincts. It is against the Yankees — the Northern sons of free 
soil, free toil and intelligence, the hated Abolitionists, whose success would sweep 
away slavery and reduce the Southern white men to work — no wonder they are 
ready to fight to the death against this detestable alternative, especially as they 
look to victory as the certain promotion of the refuse of the "poor white" popu- 
lation of the South, of which they are one and all members, to the coveted 
dignity of slaveholders. 



21 

in their execrations of these miserable vagabonds ; yet they do not sec 
that so long as labor is considered the disgraceful portion of slaves, these 
free men will hold it nobler to starve or steal than till the earth, with none 
but the despised blacks for fellow-laborers. The blacks themselves — such 
is the infinite power of custom — acquiesce in this notion, and, as I have 
told you, consider it the lowest degradation in a white to use any exertion. 
I wonder, considering the burdens they have seen me lift, the digging, 
the planting, the rowing, and the walking I do, that they do not utterly 
contemn me, and indeed they seem lost in amazement at it. 

Talking of these Pine-landers — gipsies, without any of the romantic 
associations that belong to the latter people — led us to the origin of such 
a population, Slavery; and you may be sure I listened with infinite inte- 
rest to the opinions of a man of uncommon shrewdness and sagacity, who 
was born in the very bosom of it, and has passed his whole life among 
slaves. If any one is competent to judge of its effects, such a man is the 
one ; and this was his verdict : " I hate Slavery with all my heart; I con- 
sider it an absolute curse wherever it exists. It will keep those States 
where it does exist fifty years behind the others in improvement and 
prosperity." Farther on in the conversation he made this most remark- 
able observation : " As for its being an irremediable evil — a thing not to be 
helped or got rid of — that's all nonsense; for, as soon as people become con- 
vinced that it is their interest to get rid of it, they will find soon the means 
to do so, depend upon it. And undoubtedly this is true. This is not an 
age, nor yours a country, where a large mass of people will long endure 
what they perceive to be injurious to their fortunes and advancement. 
Blind as people often are to their highest and truest interests, your country 
folk have generally shown remarkable acuteness in finding out where their 
worldly progress suffered let or hindrance, and have removed it with lau- 
dable alacrity. Now the fact is not at all as we at the North are some- 
times told, that the Southern slaveholders deprecate the evils of slavery 
quite as much as we do ; that they see all its miseries ; that, moreover, 
they are most anxious to get rid of the whole thing, but want the means 
to do so, and submit most unwillingly to a necessity from which they can- 
not extricate themselves. All this I thought might be true before I went 
to the South, and often has the charitable supposition checked the con- 
demnation which was indignantly rising to my lips against these murderers 
of their brethren's peace. 



Dearest E : 

Passing the rice-mill this morning in my walk, I went in to look at 
the machinery, the large steam mortars which shell the rice, and which 
work under the intelligent and reliable supervision of Engineer Ned. 



22 

I was much surprised, in the course of conversation with him this 
morning, to find how much older a man he was than he appeared. Indeed, 
his youthful appearance had hitherto puzzled me much in accounting for 
his very superior intelligence and the important duties confided to him. 
He is, however, a man upward of forty years old, although he looks ten 
years younger. He attributed his own uncommonly youthful appearance 
to the fact of his never having done what he called field-work, or been 
exposed, as the common gang negroes are, to the hardships of their all but 
brutish existence. He said his former master had brought him up very 
kindly, and he had learned to tend the engines, and had never been put 
to any other work, but he said this was not the case with his poor wife. 
He wished she was as well off as he was, but she had to work in the rice- 
fields, and was " most broke in two " with labor, and exposure, and hard 
work while with child, and hard work just directly after childbearing; he 
said she could hardly crawl, and he urged me very much to speak a kind 
word for her to massa. She was almost all the time in hospital, and he 
thought she could not live long. 

Now, E , here is another instance of the horrible injustice of this 

system of slavery. In my country or in yours, a man endowed with suffi- 
cient knowledge and capacity to be an engineer would, of course, be in the 
receipt of considerable wages; his wife would, together with himself, reap 
the advantages of his ability, and share the well-being his labor earned ; 
he would be able to procure for her comfort in sickness or in health, and 
beyond the necessary household work, which the wives of most artisans are 
inured to, she would have no labor to encounter ; in case of sickness even 
these would be alleviated by the assistance *of some stout girl of all work 
or kindly neighbor, and the tidy parlor or snug bedroom would be her re- 
treat if unequal to the daily duties of her own kitchen. Think of such a 

lot compared with that of the head engineer of Mr. 's plantation, 

whose sole wages are his coarse food and raiment and miserable hovel, and 
whose wife, covered with one filthy garment of ragged texture and dingy 
color, barefooted and bareheaded, is daily driven afield to labor with aching 
pain-racked joints, under the lash of a driver, or lies languishing on the 
earthen floor of the dismal plantation hospital in a condition of utter 
physical destitution and degradation such as the most miserable dwelling of 
the poorest inhabitant of your free Northern villages never beheld the like 
of. Think of the rows of tidy tiny houses in the long suburbs of Boston and 
Philadelphia, inhabited by artisans of just the same grade as this poor 
Ned, with their white doors and steps, their hydrants of inexhaustible 
fresh flowing water, the innumerable appliances for decent comfort of their 
cheerful rooms, the gay wardrobe of the wife, her cotton prints for daily 
use, her silk for Sunday church-going ; the careful comfort of the children's 
clothing, the books and newspapers in the little parlor, the daily district 



23 

school, the weekly parish church : imagine if you can — but you are happy 
that you can not — the contrast between such an existence and that of the 
best mechanic on a Southern plantation. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CORNER-STONE OF SOUTHERN SOCIETY AND GOVERNMENT. 

" The slavery of the negro race, as maintained in the Southern 
States, appears to me fully authorized both in the Old and the New 
Testament, which, as the written word of God, afford the only in- 
fallible standard of moral rights and obligations." — Bishop 
Hopkins's Letter, page 16, Democratic Committee's Edition. 

" In all the sayings of our Saviour, we hear no injunction for the 
suppression of a slavery which existed under His eyes ; while He 
delivered many maxims and precepts which, like the golden rule, 
enter right into and regulate the relation." — Judge Woodward's 
Speech, Dec. 13th, 1860, yage 10. 



What a blasphemous use of the Word of God, to use it as an ex- 
cuse, palliation, and even Divine sanction, for the horrible system, 
laid bare and quivering, in the following extracts ! 

(Extract from Journal of Mrs. Kemble.) 
On my return from the river I had a long and painful conversation with 

Mr. upon the subject of the flogging which had been inflicted on the 

wretched Teresa. These discussions are terrible : they throw me into per- 
fect agonies of distress for the slaves, whose position is utterly hopeless; 
for myself, whose intervention in their behalf somtimes seems to me worse 

than useless; for Mr. , whose share in this horrible system fills me by 

turns with indignation and pity. But, after all, what can he do ? how 
oan he help it all? Moreover, born and bred in America, how should he 
eare or wish to help it ? and, of course, he does not; and I am in despair 
that he does not: et voila, it is a happy and hopeful plight for us both. 
He maintained that there had been neither hardship nor injustice in the 
oasc of Teresa's flogging; and that, moreover, she had not been flogged at 
all for complaining to me, but simply because her allotted task was not 
done at the appointed time. Of course this was the result of her having 
come to appeal to me instead of going to her labor ; and as she knew per- 
fectly well the penalty she was incurring, he maintained that there was 
ueither hardship nor injustice in the case; the whole thing was a regularly 



24 

established law, with which all the slaves were perfectly well acquainted ; 
and this case was no exception whatever. The circumstance of my being 
on the island could not, of course, be allowed to overthrow the whole 
system of discipline established to secure the labor and obedience of the 
slaves ; and if they chose to try experiments as to that fact, they and I 
must take the consequences. At the end of the day, the driver of the 

gang to which Teresa belongs reported her work not done, and Mr. 

ordered him to give her the usual number of stripes, which order the 
driver of course obeyed, without knowing how Teresa had employed her 

time instead of hoeing. But Mr. knew well enough, for the 

wretched woman told me that she had herself told him she should appeal 
to me about her weakness, and. suffering, and inability to do the work ex- 
acted from her. 

He did not, however, think proper to exceed in her punishment the 
usual number of stripes allotted to the non-performance of the appointed 
daily task, and Mr. pronounced the whole transaction perfectly satis- 
factory and en regie. The common drivers are limited in their powers of 
chastisement, not being allowed to administer more than a certain number 
of lashes to their fellow-slaves. Headman Frank, as he is called, has 
alone the privilege of exceeding this limit ; and the overseer's latitude of 
infliction is only curtailed by the necessity of avoiding injury to life or 
limb. The master's irresponsible power has no such bound. When I was 
thus silenced on the particular case under discussion, I resorted, in my 
distress and indignation, to the abstract question, as I never can refrain 

from doing ; and to Mr. 's assertion of the justice of poor Teresa's 

punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced 
labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, 
the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to maintain 
in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I said I 
thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal 
chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or 

humane man. Mr. said he thought it was disagreeable, and left me 

to my reflections with that concession. My letter has been interrupted 
for the last three days — by nothing special, however. My occupation* 

and interests here, of course, know no change ; but Mr. has been 

anxious for a little while past that we should go down to St. Simon's, the 
cotton plantation. 

Returning to the house, I passed up the "street." It was between 
eleven o'clock and noon, and the people were taking their first meal in the 

day. By-the-by, E , how do you think Berkshire county farmers 

would relish laboring hard all day upon two meals of Indian corn or 
hominy ? Such is the regulation on this plantation, however, and I beg 



25 

you to bear in mind that the negroes on Mr. 's estate are generally 

considered well off. They go to the fields at daybreak, carrying with them 
their allowance of food for the day, which, toward noon, aiul not till than, 
they eat, cooking it over a fire, which they kindle as best they can, where 
they are working. Their second meal in the day is at night, after their 
labor is over, having worked, at the very hast, six hours without inter- 
mission of rest or refreshment since their noonday meal (properly so 
called, for 'tis meal, and nothing else). Those that I passed to-day, sitting 
on their door-steps, or on the ground round them eating, were the people 
employed at the mill and threshing-floor. As these are near to the settle- 
ment, they had time to get their food from the cook shop. Chairs, tables, 
plates, kuives, forks, they had none ; they sat, as I before said, on the 
earth or door-steps, and ate either out of their little cedar tubs or an iron 
pot, some few with broken iron spoons, more with pieces of wood, and all 
the children with their fingers. A more complete sample of savage feed- 
ing I never beheld. 



At the upper end of the row of houses, and nearest to our overseer's 
residence, is the hut of the head driver. Let me explain, by the way, his 
ofiice. Ihe negroes, as I before told you, are divided into troops or gangs, 
as they are called ; at the head of each gang is a driver, who stands over 
them, whip in hand, while they perform their daily task, who renders an 
account of each individual slave and his work every evening to the over- 
seer, and receives from him directions for their next day's tasks. Each 
driver is allowed to inflict a dozen lashes upon any refractory slave in the 
field, and at the time of the offence; they may not, however, extend the 
chastisement, and if it is found ineffectual, their remedy lies in reporting 
the unmanageable individual either to the head driver or the overseer, the 
former of whom has power to inflict three dozen lashes at his own discre- 
tion, and the latter as many as he himself sees fit, within the number of 
fifty ; which limit, however, I must tell you, is an arbitrary one on this 

plantation, appointed by the founder of the estate, Major , Mr. 's 

grandfather, many of whose regulations, indeed I believe most of them, 
are still observed in the government of the plantation. Limits of this 
sort, however, to the power of either driver, head driver, or overseer, may 
or may not exist elsewhere ; they are, to a certain degree, a check upon 
the power of these individuals ; but in the absence of the master, the over- 
seer may confine himself within the limit or not, as he chooses; and as for 
the master himself, where is his limit? He may, if he likes, flog a slav ■ 
to death, for the laws which pretend that he may not are a mere pretence, 
inasmuch as the testimony of a black is never taken against a white; and 
upon this plantation of ours, and a thousand more, the overseer is the only 
white man, so whence should come the testimony to any crime of his? 



26 

With regard to the oft-repeated statement that it is not the owner's 
interest to destroy bis human property, it answers. nothing; the instances 
in which men, to gratify the immediate impulse of passion, sacrifice not 
only their eternal, but their evident, palpable, positive worldly interest, 
are infinite. Nothing is commoner than for a man under the transient in- 
fluence of anger to disregard his worldly advantage ; and the black slave, 
whose preservation is indeed supposed to be his owner's interest, may be, 
will be, and is occasionally sacrificed to trhe blind impulse of passion. 



In the evening I had a visit from Mr. C and Mr. B , who 

officiates to-morrow at our small island church. The conversation I had 
with these gentlemen was sad enough. They seem good, and kind, and 
amiable men, and I have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of 
slaveholders; but to one who has lived outside this dreadful atmosphere, 
the whole tone of their discourse has a morally muffled sound, which one 

must hear to be able to conceive. Mr. B told me that the people on 

this plantation not going to church was the result of a positive order from 

Mr. K , who had peremptorily forbidden their doing so, and, of course, 

to have infringed that order would have been to incur severe corporal 

chastisement. Bishop B , it seems, had advised that there should be 

periodical preaching on the plantations, which, said Mr. B , would 

have obviated any necessity for the people of different estates congregating 
at any given point at stated times, which might perhaps be objectionable, 
and at the same time would meet the reproach which was now beginning 
to be directed toward Southern planters as a class, of neglecting the eternal 

interest of their dependents. But Mr. K had equally objected to this. 

He seems to have held religious teaching a mighty dangerous thing — and 
how right he was ! I have met with conventional cowardice of various 
shades and shapes in various societies that I have lived in, but anything 
like the pervading timidity of tone which I find here on all subjects, but, 
above all, on that of the condition of the slaves, I have never dreamed of. 
Truly slavery begets slavery, and the perpetual state of suspicion and ap- 
prehension of the slaveholders is a very handsome offset, to say the least 
of it, against the fetters and the lash of the slaves. Poor people, one and 
all, but especially poor oppressors of the oppressed ! The attitude of these 
men is really pitiable ; they profess (perhaps some of them strive to do so 
indeed) to consult the best interests of their slaves, and yet shrink back 
terrified from the approach of the slightest intellectual or moral improve- 
ment which might modify their degraded and miserable existence. I do 
pity these deplorable servants of two masters more than any human beings 
I have ever seen — more than their own slaves a thousand times ! 



I asked him several questions about some of the slaves who had managed 



27 

to learn to read, and by what means they had been able to do so. As 
teaching them is strictly prohibited by the laws, they who instructed them, 
and such of them as acquired the knowledge, must have been not a little 
determined and persevering. This was my view of the case, of course, 
and of course it was not the overseer's. I asked him if many of Mr. 

's slaves could read. He said, " No ; very few, he was happy to say, 

but those few were just so many too many." " Why, had he observed any 
insubordination in those who did V And I reminded him of Cooper 
London, the Methodist preacher, whose performance of the burial service 
had struck me so much some time ago, to whose exemplary conduct and 
character there is but one concurrent testimony all over the plantation. 
No; he had no special complaint to bring against the lettered members of 
hm subject community, but he spoke by anticipation. Every step they 
taKe towards intelligence and enlightenment, lessens the probability of 
their acquiescing in their condition. Their condition is not to be changed, 
— ergo, they had better not learn to read ; a very succinct and satisfactory 
argument as far as it goes, no doubt, and one to which I had not a word 

to reply, at any rate, to Mr. , as I did not feel called upon to discuss 

the abstract justice or equity of the matter with him. Indeed, he, to a 
certain degree, gave up that part of the position, starting with " I don't 
say whether it is right or wrong •" and in all conversations that I have had 
with the Southerners upon these subjects, whether out of civility to what 
may be supposed to be an Englishwoman's prejudices, or a forlorn respect 
to their own convictions, the question of the fundamental wrong of Slavery 
is generally admitted, or at any rate, certainly never denied. That part 
of the subject is summarily dismissed, and all its other aspects vindicated, 
excused, and even lauded with untiring eloquence. Of course, of the ab- 
stract question I could judge before I came here, but I confess I had not 
the remotest idea how absolutely my observation of every detail of the 
system, as a practical iniquity, would go to confirm my opinion of its 

abomination. Mr. went on to condemn and utterly denounce all 

the preaching, and teaching, and moral instruction upon religious subjects 
which people in the South, pressed upon by Northern opinion, are endea- 
voring to give their slaves. The kinder and the more cowardly masters 
are anxious to evade the charge of keeping their negroes in brutish igno- 
rance, and so they crumble what they suppose and hope may prove a little 
harmless religious enlightenment, which, mixed up with much religious 
authority on the subject of submission and fidelity to masters, they trust 
their slaves may swallow without its doing them any harm, — i. c, that 
they may be better Christians and better slaves, — and so, indeed, no doubt 

they are ; but it is a very dangerous experiment, and from Mr. 's 

point of view, I quite agree with him. The letting out of water, or the 
letting in of light, in infinitesimal quantities, is not always easy. The 



28 

half-wicked of the earth are the leaks through which wickedness is even- 
tually swamped ; compromises forerun absolute surrender in most matters, 
and fools and cowards are, in such cases, the instruments of Providence 

for their own defeat. Mr. stated unequivocally his opinion that 

free labor would be more profitable on the plantations than the work of 
slaves, which, being compulsory, was of the worst possible quality and the 
smallest possible quantity; then the charge of them before and after they 
are able to work is onerous, the cost of feeding and clothing them very- 
considerable, and upon the whole, he, a Southern overseer, pronounced 
himself decidedly in favor of free labor, upon grounds of expediency. 
Having at the beginning of our conversation declined discussing the moral 
aspect of Slavery, evidently not thinking that position tenable, I thought 
I had every right to consider Mr. 's slave-driver a decided Aboli- 
tionist. 



After the departure of this poor woman, I walked down the settlement 
toward the infirmary or hospital, calling in at one or two of the houses 
along the row. These cabins consist of one room, about twelve feet by 
fifteen, with a couple of closets smaller and closer than the state-rooms of 
a ship, divided off from the main room and each other by rough wooden 
partitions, in which the inhabitants sleep. They have almost all of them 
a rude bedstead, with the gray moss of the forests for mattress, and filthy, 
pestilential-looking blankets for covering. Two families (sometimes eight 
and ten in number) reside in one of these huts, which are mere wooden 
frames pinned, as it were, to the earth by a brick chimney outside, whose 
enormous aperture within pours down a flood of air, but little counteracted 
by the miserable spark of fire, which hardly sends an attenuated thread of 
lingering smoke up its huge throat. A wide ditch runs immediately at 
the back of these dwellings, which is filled and emptied daily by the tide. 
Attached to each hovel is a small scrap of ground for a garden, which, 
however, is for the most part untended and uncultivated. Such of these 
dwellings as I visited to-day were filthy and wretched in the extreme, and 
exhibited that most deplorable consequence of ignorance and an abject 
condition, the inability of the inhabitants to secure and improve even such 
pitiful comfort as might yet be achieved by them. Instead of the order, 
neatness, and ingenuity which might convert even these miserable hovels 
into tolerable residences, there was the careless, reckless, filthy indolence, 
which even the brutes do not exhibit in their lairs and nests, and which 
seemed incapable of applying to the uses of existence the few miserable 
means of comfort yet within their reach. Firewood and shavings lay 
littered about the floors, while the half-naked children were cowering 
round two or three smouldering cinders. The moss, with which tha 
chinks and crannies of their ill-protecting dwellings might have been 



29 

stuffed, was trailing in dirt and dust about the ground, while the back 
door of the huts, opening upon a most unsightly ditch, was left wide open 
for the fowls and ducks, which they are allowed to raise, to travel in and 
out, increasing the tilth of the cabin by what they brought and left in 
every direction. In the midst of the floor, or squatting round the cold 
hearth, would be four or five little children from four to ten years old, the 
latter all with babies in their arms, the care of the infants being taken 
from the mothers (who are driven afield as soon as they recover from child 
labor), and devolved upon these poor little nurses, as they are called, whose 
business it is to watch the infant, and carry it to its mother whenever it 
may require nourishment. To these hardly human little beings I ad- 
dressed my remonstrances about the filth, cold, and unnecessary wretched- 
ness of their room, bidding the elder boys and girls kindle up the fire, 
sweep the floor, and expel the poultry. For- a long time ray very words 
seemed unintelligible to them, till, when I began to sweep and make up 
the fire, etc., they first fell to laughing, and then imitating me. The in- 
crustations of dirt on their hands, feet, and faces, were my next object of 
attack, and the stupid negro practice (by-the-by, but a short time since 
nearly universal in 'enlightened Europe) of keeping the babies with their 
feet bare, and their heads, already well capped by nature with their woolly 
hair, wrapped in half a dozen hot, filthy coverings. Thus I travelled down 
the "street," in every dwelling endeavoring to awaken a new perception, 
that of cleanliness, sighing, as I went, over the futility of my own exer- 
tions, for how can slaves be improved? Nathless, thought I, let what can 
be done; for it may be that, the two being incompatible, improvement may 
yet expel Slavery; and so it might, and surely would, if, instead of begin- 
ning at the end, I could but begin at the beginning of my task. If the 
mind and soul were awakened, instead of mere physical good attempted, 
the physical good would result, and the great curse vanish away; but my 
hands are tied fast, and this corner of the work is all that I may do. Yet 
it can not be but, from my words and actions, some revelations should 
reach these poor people; and going in and out among them perpetually, I 
shall teach, and they learn involuntarily a thousand things of deepest im- 
port. They must learn, and who can tell the fruit of that knowledge 
alone, that there are beings in the world, even with skins of a different 
color from their own, who have sympathy for their misfortunes, love for 
their virtues, and respect for their common nature — but oh ! my heart is 
full almost to bursting as I walk among these most poor creatures. 



The infirmary is a large two-story building, terminating the broad 
orange-planted space between the two rows of houses which form the first 
settlement j it is built of whitewashed wood, and contains four large-sized 
rooms. But how shall I describe to you the spectacle which was pre- 



30 

sented to me on entering the first of these ? But half the casements, of 
which there were six, were glazed, and these were obscured with dirt, 
almost as much as the other windowless ones were darkened by the dingy 
shutters, which the shivering inmates had fastened to in order to protect 
themselves from the cold. In the enormous chimney glimmered the 
powerless embers of a few sticks of wood, round which, however, as many 
of the sick women as could approach were cowering, some on wooden 
settles, most of them on the ground, excluding those who were too ill to 
rise; and these last poor wretches lay prostrate on the floor, without bed, 
math-eSsj or pillow, buried in tattered and filthy blankets, which, huddled 
roui: r l them as they lay strewed about, left hardly space to move upon the 
floor. And here, in their hour of sickness and suffering, lay those whose 
health and strength are spent in unrequited labor for us — those who, 
perhaps own yesterday, were being urged on to their unpaid task — 
those whose husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were even at that 
hour sweating over the earth, whose produce was to buy for us all 
the luxuries which health can revel in, all the comforts which can alle- 
viate sickness. I stood in the midst of them, perfectly unable to speak, 
the tears pouring from my eyes at this sad spectacle of their misery, 
myself and my emotion alike strange and incomprehensible to them. 
Here lay women expecting every hour the terrors and agonies of childbirth, 
others who had just brought their doomed offspring into the world, others 
who were groaning over the anguish and bitter disappointment of miscar- 
riages — here lay some burning with fever, others chilled with cold and 
aching with rheumatism, upon the hard cold ground, the draughts and 
dampness of the atmosphere increasing their sufferings, and dirt, noise, 
and stench, and every aggravation of which sickness is capable, combined 
in their condition — here they lay like brute beasts, absorbed in physical 
suffering; unvisited by any of those Divine influences which may ennoble 
the dispensations of pain and illness, forsaken, as it seemed to me, of all 
good; and yet, God, Thou surely hadst not forsaken them! Now pray 
take notice that this is the hospital of an estate where the owners are sup- 
posed to be humane, the overseer efficient and kind, and the negroes re- 
markably well cared for and comfortable. As soon as I recovered from 
my dismay, I addressed old Rose the midwife, who had charge of this 
room, bidding her open the shutters of such windows as were glazed, and 
let in the light. I next proceeded to make up the fire; but, upon my 
lifting a log for that purpose, there was one universal outcry of horror, and 
old Rose, attempting to snatch it from me, exclaimed, " Let alone, missis — 
let be ; what for you lift wood? you have nigger enough, missis, to do it!" 
I hereupon had to explain to them my view of the purposes for which 
hands and arms were appended to our bodies, and forthwith began making 
Rose tidy up the miserable apartment, removing all the filth and rubbish 



31 

from the floor that could be removed, folding up in piles the blaukets of 
the patients who were not using them, and placing, in rather more 
sheltered and comfortable positions, those who were unable to rise. It was 
all that I could do, and having enforced upon them all my earnest desire 
that they should keep their room swept, and as tidy as possible, I passed 
on to the other room on the ground floor, and to the two above, one of 
which is appropriated to the use of the men who are ill. They were all in 
the same deplorable condition, the upper rooms being rather the more 
.miserable, inasmuch as none of the windows were glazed at all, and they 
had, therefore, only the alternative of utter darkness, or killing draughts 
of air from the unsheltered casements. In all, filth, disorder, and misery* 
abounded, the floor was the only bed, and scanty begrimed rags of blanket? 

the only covering. I left this refuge for Mr. 's sick dependents with 

my clothes covered with dust, and full of vermin, and with a heart heavy 
enough, as you will well believe. My morning's work had fatigued me 
not a little, and I was glad to return to the house, where I gave vent to 

my indignation and regret at the scene I had just witnessed to Mr. 

and his overseer, who, here, is a member of our family. The latter told 
me that the condition of the hospital had appeared to him, from his first 
entering upon his situation (only within the last year), to require a reform, 

and that he had proposed it to the former manager, Mr. K , and 

Mr. 'a brother, who is part proprietor of the estate, but, receiving no 

encouragement from them, had supposed that it was a matter of indiffer- 
ence to the owners, and had left it in the condition in which he had found 
it, in which condition it has been for the last nineteen years and upward. 



I have been interrupted by several visits, my clear E , among other, 

one from a poor creature called Judy, whose sad story and condition affected 
me most painfully. She had been married, she said, some years ago to 
one of the men called Temba, who, however, now has another wife, having 
left her because she went mad. While out of her mind she escaped, into 
the jungle, and contrived to secrete herself there for some time, but was 
finally tracked and caught, and brought back and punished by being made 
to sit, day after day, for hours in the stocks, — a severe punishment for a 
man, but for a woman perfectly barbarous. She complained of chronic 
rheumatism, and other terrible ailments, and said she suffered such in- 
tolerable pain while laboring in the fields, that she had come to entreat 
me to have her work lightened. She could hardly crawl, and cried bit- 
terly all the time she spoke to me. 

She told me a miserable story of her former experienoe on the planta- 
tion under Mr. K 's overscership. It seems that Jem Valiant (an 

extremely difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valor is sufficiently 
accounted for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) wa.s her 



32 

first-born, the son of Mr. K , who forced her, flogged her severely for 

having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a farther punishment, to 
Five Pound — a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which 
the slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently 
atoned for by the lash. The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor 
people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympa- 
thy, makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor crea- 
ture said that, bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that 
again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal 
swamp of Five Pound. 

I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell 
them to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain, unvarnished man- 
ner in which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I 
ought to say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying 
the simple horror and misery of their bare details. 

Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell ; her name 
was Die ; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead ; she 
had had four miscarriages : one had been caused with falling down with a 
very heavy burden on her head, and one from having her arms strained up 
to be lashed I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up. 
She said their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and 
sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn 
up to a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then 
their clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cowhide stands 
and stripes them. I give you the woman's words. She did not speak of 
this as of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable ; 
and when I said, "Did they do that to you when you were with child ?" 
she simply replied, "Yes, missis." And to all this I listen — I, an Eng- 
lishwoman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot 
say, " This thing shall not be done again ; that cruel shame and 
villainy shall never be known here again." I gave the woman meat and 
flannel, which were what she came to ask for, and remained choking with 
indignation and grief long after they had all left me to my most bitter 
thoughts. 

I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and de- 
pression which I am beginning to feel daily more and more, surrounded 
by all this misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder. 



SKETCHES OF THE LAWS OF SLAVERY. 

The letter of Judge Stroud, on the second page of our cover, has elicited the fol- 
lowing additional testimony to show that the practice is even worse than its law*. 
This comes from an eminent clergyman, who has spent most of his life in the South. 

SOUTHERN SLAVERY. 

I was truly glad to see Judge Stroud's brief but most correct description of the 
peculiar institution. I do not. suppose that any of his legal brethren will challenge 

'the proof of his veracity; nor am I inclined to furnish any detailed evidence of it ; 
but I cannot forbear to add to his testimony that of one or two Southern judges, which 
I happened to find but a few days since in Judge Stroud's own "Sketch of the Laws 

s of Slavery." Judge Ruffin, of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, in 1802, said : 
" The power of the master must be absolute. This discipline belongs to the state of 
Slavery: it constitutes the curse of Slavery to both the bond and free; but it is in- 
herent in the relation of master and slave." Judge Wardlaw, of South Carolina, has 
also said : "Every endeavor to extend to a slave positive rights is an attempt to re- 
concile inherent contradictions; for in the very nature of things, he is subject to des- 
potism." 

To these authorities let me add a remark or two. However just and benevolent 
some of the slave laws might be, and though some of them might be supposed to be 

1 obsolete, there is one law which must make the system a practical despotism, viz., 
that which denies the right of any slave to bear witness against his master. And 
further, in all the laws of the South, there is not one which protects a female slave 
against the licentiousness of a master, or gives her father or husband any redress for 
the violence to which she may be exposed. Ihis is the worst half of the "enrse" 
which Judge Ruffin admits to inhere in the system, both "to the bond and the free," 
and of which Mrs. Kemble's book is too true an illustration. 

From the above facts it may be inferred that the practice of Slavery is even worse 

' than its "laws." And it may easily be imagined how far Southern Slavery is " con- 
sistent with the precepts of the Christian religion." it is only so far that even Bishop 
Hopkins defends it, in a pamphlet, which 1 venture to say, is condemned by the 
almost universal voice of the Episcopal clergy of Vermont, as well as Pennsylvania. 

> While I have Judge Stroud's book before me, let me make another remark, and 
quote another testimony from the South itself. Southern Slavery is generally con- 
trolled not by hereditary slaveholders, but by mercenary overseers, who have no in- 
terest in the well-being of the slaves Hence, much of the barbarity which is prac- 
tised in the South, to the grief and loss of the slaveholders themselves. Of these 

' slavedrivers, the celebrated William Wirt, in his Life of Patrick Henry, as quoted by 
Judge Stroud, says: "Last, and lowest of the different classes in Virginia, is a 
feculum of beings called overseers, the most abject, degraded, unprincipled race, 
always cap in hand to the dons who employ them, and furnishing materials for thv 

'. exercise of their pride, insolence and spirit of domination." 



Fanny Kembles Lite on a Georgia Plantation. 
JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE 

ON A 

GEORGIAN PLANTATION. 

Published by HARPER k BROTHERS, Franklin Square, New York. 

"The Journal of Mrs. Frances Anne Kemble during her residence 
upon a plantation in Georgia as the wife of the proprietor, is the most thrilling 
and remarkable picture of the interior social life of the slaveholding section in 
this country that has ever been published. Our previous accounts of that life 
have been derived from outside observers; but the Journal of Mrs. Kemble 
was jotted down from day to day as she lived upon the plantation of which 
she was mistress. There is no excuse, no palliation of facts, but the whole 
system is laid bare and quivering before the eye. So faithful and final a wit- 
ness we have not had. Even Uncle Tom's Cabin is only founded upon fact. 
The Journal of Mrs. Kemble is fact itself." 

"In one respect, this writer's narrative of plantation life stands alone in 
literature. She was a woman — and an active, intelligent, strong-willed 
woman — capable to see for herself, strong enough and active enough to exa- 
mine closely, and able to describe what she saw. Her sex brought her spe- 
cially in contact with the slave women. A man, unless he had been a physi- ' 
eian, would have known nothing of the most of the sorrows and sufferings 
which were confided to her without scruple. As we read we wonder how the 
women of the South could endure a system which brought such shame and 
such pain, and worse than pain, on so many of their sisters. We wonder how 
the wives of slaveholders could bear to see and to know what was passing about 
them, or by what art they managed to shut eyes and ears and heart. Slavery 
never appeared so hateful, nor slaveholders so vulgar and brutal, as in these 
pages, where a woman tells the world what the black women of the South have 
so long endured." 

" Read the unvarnished tale. It is all the more real and impressive be- 
cause it is unvarnished. . . . And what a story ! Not Mrs. Stowe's most vivid 
and thrilling pictures, nor Mr. Phillips's most scathing maledictions, nor Mr. 
Douglass's most harrowing recitals, have made the woes and horrors and 
crimes of Slavery so real and awful as they appear in this plain, fe very-day 
record of facts. Especially is the bearing of Slavery upon woman, upon mar- 
riage, upon the family relation, upon all that is dearest and most sacred in 
life, set forth with a fidelity which no pen has ever before attempted." 

" Would that this book could be scattered broadcast over the country. . . . 
By all means let this book be read and studied all over the land." 



H 33. 89 
















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